Remarks on Foreign Policy at the Heritage Foundation

Thank you to the Heritage Foundation for hosting me today. Thanks to Dr. Kevin Roberts for the great work you have done since taking the helm. You know, whenever I see the establishment launching attacks against the Heritage Foundation, I know you guys must be doing something right. So just keep up at it and keep on going. During my six years serving in the Congress, I worked very closely with Heritage on a number of issues, but particularly issues relating to national security matters. I came to Congress on the heels of having served in uniform in Iraq during the post-Saddam period of conflict, a time when US troops faced attacks from both Sunni jihadists like al Qaeda in Iraq but also Shia militias that were funded and directed by the mullahs in Iran. And those Iranian militias were responsible for killing hundreds if not over a thousand of American troops. I knew that the suboptimal outcomes in Iraq and Afghanistan represented a failure of US national security policy. I also believed as I arrived in Congress that neither post 9/11 neo-conservatism, which represented a departure from traditional Reagan-esque peace through strength policies, nor the fecklessness of the Obama administration, which merely invited hostility from America's adversaries were desirable vessels for a successful national security strategy. So my approach was to stress the need to do a number of things one, for American strength to deter our enemies. Two, to protect our own borders and enforce American sovereignty. Three, to ensure that US foreign policy served the interests first and foremost of the American people. Next, to avoid plunging America into any ill-defined or unnecessary conflicts and rejection of ceding American sovereignty to international organizations like the United Nations. Now in Congress, we lead on issues that matter when it came to the nation's national security. I was one of the leading opponents of the Obama-Khamenei Iran nuclear deal, and we were instrumental in pointing out the flaws of that disastrous policy. As the chairman of the National Security Committee on House Oversight, we exposed a lot of the flaws in this nation's Afghanistan policy and did that in ways that were really embarrassing for a lot of policymakers. I served six years on House Foreign Affairs, and I was one of, if not the leading advocate for pro-Israel policies such as relocating our embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, recognizing Israeli sovereignty of the Golan Heights, combating the boycott, divestment, and sanction movement and seeking to defund entities like Hamas and the Palestinian Authority.

I was also one of the voices in Congress sounding the alarm against Hamas terrorism and Israel's need to finally deal with that, as well as the nefarious influence of the Sunni Muslim Brotherhood. We combated Marxism in the Western Hemisphere in places like Cuba and Venezuela. We understood and made it an issue to treat our border security as a national security issue. We also highlighted the dangers of domestic terrorism and the role that immigration plays in fueling that terrorism. Now, since I took the helm as governor of Florida, we have been engaged in a lot of these important issues. We lead the fight in Florida, against Airbnb's BDS policies against the State of Israel. And as a result of that, Airbnb reversed course. We've expanded academic and economic ties with the State of Israel. We've bolstered relationships between Florida and Japan, and Florida and South Korea. We sent law enforcement and the National Guard to the southern border to help Texas do what the federal government has failed to do. And we also sent illegal aliens to Martha's Vineyard, which put the issue on the front burner in ways that no other single action has done.

More recently, we arranged for the rescue of close to 700 Americans from Israel following the Hamas terrorist attacks, the State Department, the embassy, they weren't doing what needed to be done to get Americans back home. Eventually, they said they'll dump you in Greece and then charge you for that. And I thought to myself, you know, if you come into this country illegally, they don't charge you to fly you all over the place. They put you in hotels, they don't charge the illegal alien that but yet Americans fleeing a war zone, somehow they're going to get a bill? It isn't right. And then more recently we deactivated Students for Justice in Palestine in our Florida University system.

They are a group, which publicly says that they don't just stand in solidarity with Hamas, that they are part of what Hamas is doing. That is material support to terrorism and that is not going to be tolerated in the state of Florida and it should not be tolerated in these United States of America. So we're proud of what we've been able to do as governor.

But as we look across the world now, we are a nation adrift. The Biden foreign policy is rudderless, weak, misguided, and solicitous of America's adversary. Just think of some of the things that have happened in just these two and a half years. The Afghanistan withdrawal dishonors the sacrifices of our service members, and they abandoned billions worth of military equipment to the Taliban. Biden has empowered Iran with sanctions relief that has fueled the Hamas attacks, that has fueled what Russia is doing in Europe. Biden also invited the Russian aggression against Ukraine by displaying weakness and even publicly stating that a small invasion would be a-okay. Biden's placed ideological ambitions like the Green New Deal over American energy dominance and independence, that have helped America's adversaries Iran, China, Russia, Venezuela. Biden has also sacrificed strong policy against the CCP, which we need in favor of climate talks in a summit with Xi Jinping, all the while China provides patronage to Russia and to Iran. This is just the fact American power is on the decline. This has been happening for some time, but it is accelerating under the Biden administration. As we sit here today, we've learned some hard lessons and the post-Cold War world. We've seen the limits and indeed futility of trying to impose democracies on foreign cultures. We understand the perils with nation-building and social engineering in foreign lands. We've seen military adventurism go awry such as the Obama, Hillary, Libya escapade. We've seen the ruling class in this country empower China for a generation. They had promised most favored nation status would lead to a more democratic China, that we would be able to have enforceable rules to protect our technology and intellectual property. China has been empowered as a result. And then, of course, most recently, the Chinese COVID virus that came from the Wuhan lab, American policymakers had a disastrous response to that which has weakened this country dramatically.

After the Cold War, we were the only superpower, it was a Unipolar Moment. Some people even said that we had witnessed the end of history, that it would be America standing alone, I think, wiser heads knew that that was not something that could last indefinitely. September 11, 2001, ushered in an era in which nonstate actors were viewed as the primary threat to US security and the United States just launched a global war on terrorism, with some successes, but also some failures. Where are we now? Well, now we're back in an age of great power rivalry. We are in an age in which we now have a peer competitor, and that competitor is the Chinese Communist Party. And it's something that we have to face, and we have to have policy that's going to be able to protect the American people from the looming China threat. We currently lack the leadership necessary to confront these current challenges. Part of the problem lies in a failure to even articulate, 'what are we trying to accomplish?' Regarding our nation's security, you certainly don't get a lot of clear thinking in many parts of this town. Our national security decisions must be guided by a number of clear and important factors.

First and foremost, you've got to put the American people first. The idea that it's even distinguishing to say, you want a national security strategy that puts America first shows you how far astray we must have gone with some of this stuff. Of course, that's your obligation to put your own country first. The protection of the lives, safety, and security of our people and the sovereignty of our nation is the fundamental duty of our federal government. This means both guarding against domestic attacks and achieving enforceable, secure borders. Another factor that's important is protecting the economic and material well-being of America. Ultimately, our military strength is rooted in economic strength. We're not going to be strong abroad if we are not strong at home. Third, we've got to protect the American way of life. This means not only the protections against the predations of foreign nations, but also foreign nonstate actors, as well as threats that can come domestically. Ensuring that we have an immigration system that strengthens America's culture rather than undermines it is a key part in preserving this American way of life.

Now, the use of national power cannot be based on the fluff or ill-defined objections that have marked DC foreign policy for decades. Power must be rooted in concrete objectives that the US is seeking to achieve through political, economic, and if necessary, military avenues, but we cannot succumb to Wilsonian abstractions. We cannot expand the people's treasure, much less spill our citizens' blood with murky missions or misguided agendas. When we act, we will act decisively, and we will achieve the goals that we set out to achieve. There will be no better friend to allies than the United States of America, we must work constructively with these nations with whom we have shared interests. But we also have a clear-eyed, no-nonsense approach to America's enemies. Those who seek to harm the United States of America will have no worse enemy than the United States of America. National security policies, of course, must be commensurate with the ability to carry it out. As a republic, the policies we pursue must engender sustained public support from the American people. And as a veteran of the Iraq War, I recognize the gravity of deploying US troops in combat, and I hope to never have to do that as commander in chief. But if such a duty calls, I will ensure that the US will be fully committed to winning. Our armed forces will have what they need to be lethal and capable, preferably to deter conflict in the first place, but also to achieve a decisive, overwhelming victory if conflict arises.

So where do we find ourselves now? Chaos abounds, dangers are gathering, America lacks direction, and leadership is in short supply. The world is getting more dangerous as conflicts mount. We have a major national security issue in our own country at our own southern border. We've had 7 to 8 million people pour into this country illegally since Joe Biden took office. They are not all coming from Mexico and Central America, they are coming from all over the world, from the Middle East, from Russia, from China. Do you think for a minute that America's enemies are not taking advantage of that porous southern border? So dealing with that border is not just the right thing for the United States in terms of the rule of law and our economy? It is a national security issue, and it's one that we need to tackle. The Hamas terrorist attack against Israel raises yet another front in global conflict. How did this happen? It happened because Iran funded and orchestrated the attack against the people of Israel. This is the most deadly attack, terrorist attack on record. And there were more Jews killed on October 7, than at any time since the Holocaust. We just commemorated last week, the 40th anniversary actually, this week, the 40th anniversary of the Marine Corps barracks bombing in Beirut, Lebanon in 1983. That attack was done, orchestrated by Hezbollah and the Iranians to kill Americans. And when I was in Iraq, Iran was killing our troops left and right. So they have a long history of fomenting Jihad throughout the Middle East and killing not just Jews, but Americans. It's important that we say as Americans that Israel has the right to fully defend itself against these barbarous attacks. You can't just sit there and have a terrorist group on your border, who's going to behead your babies, rape women, and massacre elderly people, and think that you can do a glancing blow and somehow that's going to take care of it. They need to end Hamas once and for all and we should be supportive of that not just publicly, but also in private not just in words, but also in our deeds. It's important that we do.

The Hamas attacks against Israel have taken some of the focus off the war in Europe. Biden invited the Russian invasion of Ukraine through his weakness. And now his policy is basically seeking a blank check to continue a policy that has no identifiable end game. Biden is also funding both sides of this conflict. His deferential posture to Iran has given them billions of dollars in sanctions relief, they have plowed that not just for terrorism in the Middle East, they're also plowing it into helping Russia with things like drones. And his Green New Deal policies also benefits Russia, which relies on energy production. Now Heritage has correctly pointed out how it is in America's interest to bring this conflict to an acceptable conclusion, to stop the decimation of our weapons reserves, and to focus our forces where they are most needed and I think that is the right approach and I commend Heritage for saying it. And so what is the right approach? Where are our forces needed? China is the key player behind both of those foreign conflicts. The CCP is keeping both Iran and Russia afloat financially. China's purchasing massive amounts of Iranian oil on the black market, thereby enriching the mullahs. And Russia is selling China gas and much, much more. And that is bolstering Russia's war machine. Now lengthy conflicts, particularly between Russia and Ukraine will ultimately benefit China, because it will distract America and it will deplete our already dwindling Western weapons and ammunition stockpiles. The threat posed by the CCP requires our primary focus and attention right now. They are the first truly peer competitor that we have dealt with in our lifetimes. If you look back at the World War Two, the Allied Powers had a much stronger economy than the Axis powers. If you look at the comparison between the United States and the Soviet Union during the Cold War, the economic comparisons, not even close. The US economy was so much more robust than the Soviet Union, yet China's near-peer competitor to ours economically, they're close to us militarily. They have a lot of leverage over our economy, because all the interconnectedness that has happened over these last many decades, largely due to bad decisions made to America's ruling class. And China has grand ambitions. They seek to be the dominant power in the entire world, and they are marshaling all their society to be able to achieve that objective. So this is a formidable threat and it requires a whole of society approach.

The next President United States must have the focus and determination to see major policy changes through. You cannot be focused on short-term political considerations, you have to do what's right, and you have to get the job done. Why is this something that we should care about? Well, look, I mean, I want to be the top country. I mean, I want to be number one in everything we do, which is kind of competitive. But that's not the crux of it. A world that's dominated by the CCP will see them export their authoritarian vision all across the world. This will be a world marked by Internet policing, artificial intelligence, facial recognition, and social credit scores, it will end up creating a global dystopia. This is a regime that you do not want to have control or influence over our society. After all, the death toll of the CCP regime, since it sees power in 1949, may very well be the highest of any government in history, it numbers in the tens of millions, many of that at the hands of Mao Zedong. And of course, China was responsible for the COVID-19 virus and pandemic and they tried to hide it and they put the rest of the world in great peril. And yet they've never been held accountable for any of that. So the United States has to treat the threat posed by the CCP the same way we treated the threat posed by the Soviet Union. We understood that the Soviet Union was trying to export communism around the world. And so we took our whole national security apparatus, and we tailored it to be able to meet that first and foremost threat. We have to recognize when we do this, resources are scarce. You have to set priorities when you're determining the proper national security posture for the United States. If you say that you can simply defend everything at once, you end up defending nothing. So I will reorient US foreign policy to prioritize the Indo-Pacific region as the most pressing part of the world for defending US interest and US security. Now, some say it's inevitable that the East win will prevail over the West win, that the 21st century will be somehow a Chinese century, and that America will continue its descent.

I'm here to tell you, decline is not inevitable. Decline is a choice. We cannot raise the white flag of surrender. We have time to get this right. But time is running out. Just as we don't want to be mired in pessimism and accept the idea of an inevitable American decline. We also can't be diluted with happy talk, decline will not be averted by looking at our situation through rose-colored glasses, telling Americans that everything is fine, and that there is no limit to what we can presently do. That type of happy talk is as off base as the notion that decline is inevitable. So our goal from a national security perspective vis-à-vis the CCP is very simple. We win and they lose.

So how do you do this? You got to do a number of things. First, we will modernize and bolster our military capability to deter CCP aggression. Peace can only be achieved through strength. Sometimes people say you deter China by worrying about this part of the world or that part of the world. My view is a little bit more simple, if you want to deter China deter China. What they will respect is strength, particularly strength in their region, we must have adequate hard power to deny China's ambitions vis-à-vis Taiwan, as well as the first island chain. As Winston Churchill noted, it's important to keep open and active the saltwater highways that make our world tic and to that end, I'm proposing a Four Oceans Navy. 355 ships by the end of the first term. 385 by the end of the second term, and a pathway for 600 ships within the next 20 years. That will be hard power that will make a difference. That will be hard power that will preserve the peace.

With respect to Taiwan, we need the training and capability to deter CCP aggression. And we need to place first in line for purchasing advanced weapons and munition, Taiwan. This is the hotspot, and we need to be there and help defend. We also have to reform and slash the bloated defense bureaucracy. We want agile innovation, quick integration of commercial technologies, we want to be able to rapidly address the pressing needs of this nation's national security policy. And then finally, we need a major overhaul of this country's defense industrial base, it is lagging and it is causing huge vulnerabilities for this country.

Second thing we need to do is unleash America's full economic potential and prevent the CCP from surpassing us as an economic power. First on that list, we are going to open up our domestic energy resources for production, whether that's federal land, whether that's permitting pipelines, whether that's Alaska, we need to open it all up. I want to be the dominant energy producer in the world by a country mile. We will choose Midland over Moscow, we will choose the Marcellus over the Molas, and we will choose Bakken over Beijing, and that will give us a great competitive advantage as a result. We also need to expand domestic mining and mineral processing of key rare earth minerals. Biden wants to force everybody to do an electric vehicle, which then will make us more dependent on China because they're the leader in producing these minerals. But then when we have our own deposits here, he takes that out of circulation and he won't let that be mined. We need to be doing the opposite, reversing the EV mandates of course, but also doing the mining that we need to be able to make our country stronger. We need to enact tax trade and regulatory policies designed to secure critical supply chains and to effectuate a strategic decoupling of the US economy from China and from the CCP. We must forcefully counter malicious CCP economic behavior, and we have to leverage our alliances in the free world versus the CCP. We could perhaps fend the CCP off just one versus one, but if we have the entire Free World on our side, that is going to give us a huge competitive economic advantage over China.

Third thing we have to do is ensure robust technological dominance in fields like robotics, quantum computing, artificial Intelligence, biotech, and blockchain. I want more money, less money going to left-wing universities, more money for R&D through our defense department. I want new players in the defense space. We shouldn't just have a handful of the same companies that we rely on to meet our defense needs. We also need to reform export controls, and work with our allies so that we're building supply chains and technology free from the CCP's malicious influence.

Fourth thing we need to do, we have to defend the homeland against CCP influence and that means we cannot have an open border. We know that there have been a large number of Chinese nationals that have come across the southern border over the last two and a half years. We need to put a stop to it, and that'll be a day one national emergency issue for me. We also need to do what we did in Florida. We need to stop allowing the CCP to purchase land near farm, take farmlands, near their military bases. In Florida, we banned China from buying land outright in our state because I don't think it's in our interest to have them gobbling up land near critical infrastructure or our farmland. We also have to take domestic intel and law enforcement agencies and revamp them. They are not serving this country well. We've had a lot of problems. We need new leadership and we need a lot of accountability in those agencies. We have to take steps to make sure that our electric grid is resilient, and that our cybersecurity defenses are as up-to-date as possible. We'll also combat malign CCP influence in education like we did in Florida,. We eliminated the so-called Confucius Institutes from our K through 12, or from our higher education system. And we cracked down on the ability of China to pour money into our state university system. We need to do that nationwide. China has been very smart about how they get into some of these crevices in our society. And we basically let them do it. The time for that is over. And of course, this follows from the border, but it'll be more than just securing the border, we've got to take action to stop China-derived fentanyl from ravaging American communities. We're losing tens of thousands of our fellow Americans every year. The precursor chemicals are made in China and shipped to the Mexican drug cartels.

Finally, we will stand for individual liberty and human dignity, expose CCP oppression, we need to give hope to those chafing under authoritarian rule.

At the end of the day, China has a lot of liabilities. They have a lot of weaknesses. They want to maintain ironclad control over their population indefinitely. And there's cracks in that and there will increasingly be more cracks in that because they are not doing what needs to be done for individuals to ultimately flourish.

So this is the decisive decade, we are in jeopardy of being the first generation of Americans to leave to our kids and grandkids in America less prosperous and less free than the one we have inherited and that would be breaking faith with every generation of Americans leading up to the president if we allow that to happen. So we must arrest our country's decline. Now in affairs both foreign and domestic, we're called upon to preserve what George Washington called the sacred fire of liberty. This is the fire that burned an Independence Hall when 56 men pledged their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor to establish a nation conceived in liberty. It's a fire that burned at a cemetery in Gettysburg, when the nation's first Republican President pledged this nation a new birth of freedom. It's a fire that burned among the boys who stormed the beaches of Normandy to liberate a continent and to preserve freedom throughout the world. It's the fire that infused the young preacher's dream relayed at the steps of the Lincoln Memorial right down the street from here, that the Declaration of Independence said what it meant and meant what it said, that all men are created equal. It's the fire that led a resolute president to stand in Berlin in front of the Brandenburg Gate and say, 'Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall,' staring down communism and ultimately winning the Cold War. So it is our responsibility to carry this torch. We do not run from this responsibility. We welcome this responsibility. And by tackling these challenges head on, we will ensure that the 21st century will in fact be an American Century. Thank you all and God bless you. Thank you. Thanks so much.